Ann showed up to babysit that weekend, nervous. She’d fantasized about that scene in the bedroom a hundred times since it had happened, and in her fantasies, Anthony grew more and more handsome, their conversations more and more intimate.
Maureen answered the door with a bright smile. Ann startled when she saw the pink dress on her. “You look nice.”
“Aren’t you sweet,” Maureen said. “I thought about returning this silly dress. I could tell you didn’t like it on me, but my husband insisted I keep it. Positively insisted, which is unusual. He just loves it. Speaking of…” She turned around and called out, “Tony? Come meet Ann.” She smiled. “I can’t believe you two haven’t even met yet.”
Ann did not correct her.
Maureen waited expectantly while Anthony and the boys wrestled on the floor. Maureen walked over to them and began to act more like a parent than Ann was used to seeing. Maureen told them to stop in her faux-stern voice: please, boys, please now, that’s enough. They didn’t listen to her and that was fine with Maureen, who didn’t seem to care. Anthony’s hair was tousled, and he appeared refreshingly lighthearted, laughing when Toby tried to put him in a headlock. “Who do you think you are, huh? André the Giant?” It was the first time Ann noticed an accent in his voice. It wasn’t like Maureen’s more refined Boston drawl; this was more working class and rough. Anthony stood up and twisted Toby around so that he was slung across his broad shoulders like a blanket. Toby weighed almost as much as Ann, but when Anthony picked him up, he could have been as light as a loaf of bread.
Toby laughed so hard he couldn’t speak.
“Anthony,” Maureen said. “Could you take a break? Ann is here.” As if he’d snapped out of a spell, Anthony slid Toby off his shoulders and onto the couch. He was flushed and breathless. The boys looked at Ann, clearly disappointed that their father would leave soon.
“No shoes on the davenport,” Maureen said, pointing disapprovingly at Toby’s sandaled feet. Ann had never heard anyone call a couch a “davenport” before.
“Fine.” Toby tagged Brooks, and the boys ran outside onto the deck.
Anthony wore a pair of pressed khakis and a light blue golf shirt, although, like his suit, the ensemble didn’t seem to fit him right. He seemed out of place in Maureen’s domesticated world, energetic where Maureen tried to impose order, dressed in an outfit he probably wouldn’t have picked for himself.
Ann tried not to smile. “I’m Ann.” She reached her hand to her employer and looked him in the eye. He smiled—a cordial smile that gave nothing away. He shook her hand. His grip was firm and forceful, sweaty. His middle finger reached toward her wrist. She tried to shake her hand loose but he gently tightened his grip and held it a few seconds longer, long enough for her to remember the feeling of his callused fingers on the back of her neck when he tugged her ponytail holder loose, long enough to linger without Maureen, who busied herself straightening up the cushions, taking no notice. “I’ve heard you’re a terrific babysitter,” he said, and smiled.
Maureen walked away and applied another coat of lipstick in the hallway mirror. “Caged animals, that’s what they are. Especially this time of night.”
“You need to let the tiger out of the cage,” Anthony said.
“Our reservation is in ten minutes,” she said. “I just need to get my purse.” She practically skipped down the hallway that led to their bedroom.
“Ah, nice color,” Anthony said, pointing at Ann’s toes. She’d painted them with the closest shade of pink she could find, given the limited selection at the General Store. She looked at him, feeling both bold and embarrassed, and smiled.
Anthony turned his attention to Brooks and Toby, who had run back into the family room. “You’ll behave for Ann tonight, right?”
“Right,” they said in unison.
Anthony walked over to the couch and picked up a needlepoint pillow with the word COTTAGE stitched into it. “This is new,” he said. “I wonder what my father would think of it.”
He tossed it to Ann, who caught it.
“He worked third shift in the Enlow Fork coal mine.”
“Where’s that?”
“Pennsylvania. Coal country. He supported us on twelve bucks an hour. Every day, he went six hundred and fifty feet underground. It was dark. Machines with teeth as big as you are chewed a hole in the ground. At any moment, something could explode or collapse. He came home looking like the earth swallowed him up and spit him back out. When he was my age, his eardrums were ruptured, his kidneys shot. His spine was a zigzag. He died of black lung.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I am too.” Anthony’s voice broke. “He was a great guy. The best, and he pissed his life away trying to provide for us. And now here I am, just a coal miner’s son, with a pillow that says ‘cottage.’ If we had a pillow like that in the house I grew up in, it would say ‘shithole.’”
All this time she’d thought of herself as the poor intruder into Maureen’s tidy world. Now she felt, well—not rich, but fortunate.
“My wife,” Anthony said. “She’s a wonderful woman, but she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. She doesn’t know hardship.”
Ann saw Maureen standing in the doorway clutching her purse, looking hurt. Suddenly Ann ached for her: it wasn’t her fault that she was born into money. It wasn’t wrong of her to try to make their home nice, and everything she did was for Anthony. She didn’t seem to know what else she was supposed to do with herself. “I’m ready,” Maureen said, looking hopeful and anxious. She walked toward the front door and jiggled the handle. “You said you wanted to let the tiger out of the cage.”
“My date with the zookeeper awaits.” He opened the door for Maureen, but before he ushered her out, he looked at Ann and said, “Don’t you think this is a terrific dress my wife is wearing?”
Ann nodded, afraid her blush was obvious. “It’s great.”
“Tell me, would you ever wear a dress like this, Ann?”
“Yeah,” Ann said. “Sure.”
Maureen seemed genuinely touched and even more grateful for Anthony’s attention. “You’re so dear,” she said, and her words made Ann feel that she was caught up in something complicated and awkward.
Maureen stepped outside and Anthony stalled at the door. He gave Ann a little wave. Just like that, Ann become part of a secret—an adult secret.